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21 January 2013

My First Two Weeks as a New Web Developer at Get Satisfaction

My random thoughts/observations after my first 2 weeks at Get Satisfaction:

I started at Get Satisfaction on January 7th, with the title of "Customer Success Engineer." So far, that has meant doing some frontend customization and jQuery hacks (jQuery is a magical miracle), which I've really enjoyed. Soon I'll be working on figuring out some oAuth stuff and helping our customers' developers figure everything out.

I've been pleasantly surprised. I hadn't heard of Get Satisfaction until Career Day, and at that point I didn't feel really interested. Well, now I love the company. Everyone is so friendly, helpful, smart, and motivated. And we're surrounded by bright orange beams and purple walls (yes, crazy color combination), so that brightens up every day. And, there is a whole slew food trucks three minutes down the street. And, people who bring their own lunches most of the time, like myself, still get to eat with everyone at the kitchen tables. And, there are all sorts of benefits in the kitchen: drinks (100% juice and hot chocolate, yay, someone understands me!), yogurt, bread, chips, popcorn, mini candy bars, etc. And, I've got a MacBook Pro at work so I don't have to carry mine back and forth anymore. And, the office is close enough for me to have a nice little bike ride. And, it's right next to 24 Hour Fitness, so it is more convenient to work out. And, there are sweet dogs in the office, including one that's 80 years old in dog years and still walking around breathing harder than me trying to get up Nob Hill on my bike.

The most frustrating thing so far has seriously been trying to figure out which health insurance to choose.

The most exciting thing has been how many great engineering things there are to learn.

Gender issues? Not an issue, as far as I can tell. I have noticed that the support people are all women, but I would attribute that more to the individuals' choices than the company's (and I'm kind of tempted to tell them how they could change their lives with Hackbright, but maybe they actually like their jobs). And there are a lot of female tech employees. Yay!

I would normally feel very worried about being behind in everything and like I can't remember much of what I'm taught, but everyone is so nice that I don't feel pressured in a bad way. They know there's a learning curve and they're patient with their explanations. At first I tried to just struggle through even though I had no idea what I was doing, but when I finally asked, I realized I should just keep asking and asking and asking. I do still have that old feeling of "just let me go home where I'm alone and can read every single written word about every topic that I'm going to come into contact with, and then I'll come back and be ready." So far, I've stuck out staying at the office. I worried a lot about the open start-up-style layout of the office because of the way I get tired constantly being around people. Luckily, there are offices you can book, and when you get sick of one area, you can go to the kitchen, or to four couch areas, or whatever. There's a down-side, though. Through a bunch of research and occupational therapy, I'm trying to re-train myself so that I don't get such intense problems with RSI (repetitive strain injury), and it is not really ideal to be constantly changing work stations.

I made some of my code live within the first few days. After staring at some JavaScript for a really, really long time, I figured out how to make a drop-down menu that automatically tags a topic, since there's no option to do that normally. I also impressed some people by offering to take on a needy customer and patiently sending things that said, "If you google [exactly what they asked], the first result will tell you how to do that" and getting them to finally figure out something on their own. I also got to play with API calls and configure some code to refine the results in a sidebar. It's so crazy that I didn't even know what API calls were four months ago!

I'm still getting used to the idea that I'm on a salary, so I can pretty much leave whenever I want to as long as I get my work done. It's silly how guilty I feel leaving before 5 PM. So far I've just kind of left around then and usually after someone else leaves, but maybe some day I'll head out without a thread of guilt because I know that I'm doing my work.

I love that Get Satisfaction is a well-established start-up. They're not huge, but they're also not tiny and starving, so it makes the whole place feel like a bunch of friends.

Yay for enjoying new jobs! I totally get you about the juice, though we just get free (glass bottled) water and tea/coffee, it was quite a nice change from what I was used to. Actually, since I'm in HR now, maybe I'll mention the juice thing . . . Glad to see you're happy with your choice!